Walkabout #18: The Red Pill
Thu May 08, 2008 at 08:47:54 AM PDT
Once upon a time I was what could be called "well off". I’d been married five years, we were both educated, employed, both had consulting interests, and our income was making its way towards that double century mark. We lived in the runt of the litter in a 1950s era subdivision, a home costing what we made in eight months, but two blocks from a very nice golf course and surrounded by refurbishment projects that would sell for four to six times our home’s value when completed.
2001 - 2002 was an utter disaster. Our new daughter was a joy but in retrospect the signs of my ex’s slide into a sort of mental illness for which there is no cure and little remediation was already underway. 9/11 took out the voice carrier where I worked. I lost control of a business I’d funded with my profits from the dotcom bust, and my ex lost her executive position at the state university due to her condition.
There wasn’t a phrase for it then but very soon now a great many unsuspecting Americans are going to be joining those of us in the ranks of the Formerly Well Off.
Jeffrey Brown, user westexas on The Oil Drum, is apparently the one who coined the phrase and popularized its abbreviation to FWO. He is also the shining beacon of joy behind the Export Land Model. Short English translation of this? Peak oil is real and we are so screwed.
Energy concerns are just one of the three things closing in on us; user Burgundy on The Oil Drum enumerates and labels them: Triumvirate of Collapse – Economy, Ecosystem, Energy.
I don’t have to lecture Kossacks on environmental concerns. There are a few nutters here who aren’t yet tuned up on peak oil but the world is going to move that misconception into the flat earth category before too long and most with eyes can see it coming. The internalization of the scope of the fraud from the mortgage scam and standing behind it the shadow banking system of hedge funds and their structured investment vehicles is a bit harder to visualize.
I can read an SEC filing if I have an interest in the company that filed it and I worked for several years as a financial systems programmer for a large publicly held company so I know a bit about finance. I find no better summation of what is happening in the world than the work of Ilargi and Stoneleigh over at The Automatic Earth. They site primary sources and provide just enough commentary to make it digestible. If you’re not used to reading things of a financial nature it can seem like talking to a member of the disloyal Christian Right who is just certain the end of days is upon us. Don’t let that fool you – for the global financial system it is the end of days. I wrote a bit about it a bit once before – I’m labeling it The Ginormous Banking Enema of 2008. Go and satisfy yourself that it’s real and happening right now; Burgundy’s Triumvirate are the three ingredients to the red pill that many will be taking between now and the 2008 election.
As I’ve said before most of what you see in this Walkabout series is simply stuff I’d normally do – traveling about, meeting up with strange folk on the road, walking (and occasionally sleeping) in whatever passes for the great outdoors where I happen to be, and in general very pointedly not behaving like most of the rest of the people you might know. I’m taking the time to write about it because I think that very soon a great many Americans are going to be dispossessed, just as I was seven years ago, and they’re going to need a new model of what passes for success in hard times.
Now I’m a child of depression babies, my father was disabled when I was in junior high, and I grew up in a rural are, so I’d already had the experience of getting taken down a notch financially, but my parents didn’t flip because it was nowhere near as hard as their childhoods were. When my dad had to stop working for the railroad he could still do all sorts of things; the garden was tilled to double the size it had been the year before, the mix of animals already on the farm changed to reflect that there’d be a full time caretaker on hand, and my brother and I were old enough to go about getting our own money working on other people’s farms. Quelling goat riots here at farmerchuck’s place is like stepping into the time portal and landing back in my late childhood as far as I’m concerned.
I hope I’m managing to speak a bit to those who’ve not had the life experiences of privation and hard work ... yet One of the big things that is going to be an issue is skill sets. If you are a loan officer or otherwise involved in the so called "financial sector", if you’re involved in the health care field but you don’t actually do things to heal folks, or if you’re any other sort of administrative worker you may very well find yourself stripped of everything that won’t fit into one carload and pushed along from place to place, just like the Joad family in Grapes of Wrath. This goes pretty much for everyone who is involved in anything that could be filed under "discretionary spending"; there will be much less of that.
So, what can you do? First and foremost unless you’re completely physically disabled you’re entirely capable of shoveling shit. Everyone ought to shovel a little shit at some point in their life. I haven’t photographed it yet since it isn’t a real high impact activity here at No Snivlin’ Farm, but pretty soon this beastie is going to get filled over and over as we clear the goat barn.
You need to pick up some usable skills. Gardening! This one is ridiculous easy to begin, as all you need is a seed and a place to put it, but mastery ... well ... my mom has had a garden for over fifty years and she still learns something new with each passing year. There are good books out there – hit the books section over at Seed Savers Exchange. By way of introduction these guys run an 891 acre farm near Decorah, Iowa and they maintain thousands of heirloom seed varieties; if you just buy seed at Walmart you’re getting a sterile, corporate owned hybrid. Just search for and insist on using heirloom seeds – these will continue to produce for you long after the local big box store closes its doors.
Skilled labor is better than unskilled in terms of pay and opportunities. If you’ve got a trade like carpentry or plumbing or so forth life will likely continue to present opportunities. If you don’t have such a background today would not be too soon for you to learn to do something that will be perceived as useful in a world with much less oil and credit. Chuck is on this – one of our tasks, if I hang around long enough, is the conversion of old shipping containers to housing for apprentices – eight weeks here on No Snivlin’ Farm will do much to make you useful to a newly formed cooperative in your area.
Farmerchuck is all over this cooperative stuff. We have ‘em in Iowa but they’re corporations now – dozens of employees, tens of millions in assets – a sensible thing for industrial scale farming. The other coop people know is the little grocery store where you can get Honest Tea and organic things the large chains don’t carry. Chuck believes, and I’m with him on this, that quality of life is about to start depending quite heavily on local community and a cooperative has many legal and financial benefits, as well as being a nice ideological fit for our need to relocalize most everything we do.
I think one of the biggest helps in all this is a little visualization. I walked around amazed for a week or two after I grasped the implications of peak oil, looking carefully at each and every thing I handled during the day, looking for the fossil fuel inputs. What will happen if you lose your job? Your spouse? What if one out of every four of your neighbors does? What about one out of every two? What if gas prices stop being $3.60 and start being $6.30?
I can’t stress this enough – if you’ve got the time to get to a community college and retrain you should do so at once. Doesn’t have to be a degree – credentialism is going out the window in a relocalized world; it’ll come down to those you know coupled with what you can do. Learning to handle a gun might be important if we go the way Argentina did, per Ferfal’s fine reporting, but equally important and much more applicable is paramedic training followed by nursing. As we’ve seen this week here on No Snivlin Farm, handling injuries large and small, both animal and human, vastly exceeds the need for the occasional impromptu coyote hunt.
Do you know someone who has a skill that will remain usable in a post peak oil world? If they’re a freelancer you’re a fool if you don’t call them as soon as you’re done with this diary and beg for a chance to go along and carry their tools on the next job. College is one thing, apprenticeship something else entirely; one can learn most of what is needed for a goat dairy in a summer, but you’ll require a lifetime of contact with others in this community of practice to be successful. No one can know it all, those that appear to have a massive rolodex in their head filled with people whom they’ve helped with a bit of advice here or there.
I could go on and on about this, dispatching you to read Ran Prieur and stuff like that, but I hope if you’ve been following the Walkabout series you’re already starting to get a sense of things. This one is long on verbiage and short on photos but I felt it was time – I’ve got an invite to go visit some folks in Vermont that want to do what farmerchuck is doing here, there are others in Colorado, Ohio, and West Virginia, and yesterday I got a comment from the first Kossack I’ve noticed who is a fellow itinerant.
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